This is the second chapter of Alex Shane’s Guide to pro Wrestling – Volume 1. This article deals with the importance of understanding ego before getting into pro wrestling and delves into what Alex believes is the reason for pro wrestling’s high death rate. The full book can be purchased by going to www.alexshane.co.uk

Alex Shane’s Guide to Pro Wrestling
Chapter Two

Before you can really begin to teach a student or mentor, a current performer, there is some very important information I find vital to make them aware of. This information may sound completely unrelated to the purpose of this article, which is to help people get better at what they do within the business, but to forsake what follows in order to get straight to the nuts and bolts of the squared circle will ultimately come back to haunt them in years to come. With the current death rate in wrestling being seen by the media as an epidemic I want to shed a little light on what is really causing it whilst using the sample principle to help make people’s wrestling improve thus giving them a real chance of making some money out of the industry they love. This is very deep in places but it is nothing that isn’t sorely needed.

A lot of people that run wrestling schools have the amazing privilege of being able to help mould and guide many lost teenagers who come to there school looking for somewhere to belong. Sadly because many of the schools are being run by people just as lost, if not more so, than the students looking for guidance, many valuable life lessons are not taught. Lessons that would make the students happier, better rounded people and not just better rounded wrestlers.

Everybody has an area that they naturally excel in above other aspects of their life. At school you very rarely find that the top of the class in maths is a smash with the ladies and vice versa. Although everyone has key areas, which they seem to have more natural development in than others, this does not mean that we were simply meant to stay in our little bubble for fear of trying something that we weren’t so quick to grasp. Life is all about balance. It is nature’s way of creating harmony. The Sun and the Moon are a perfect example. Male and female is yet another. Without this balance nothing could exist.

When a wrestler has to have surgery on their “bitch tits” from steroid use few people ever question why someone injecting male hormone would start to grow female breast. The answer is simply balance. Our body is meant to work in perfect harmony. When we increase our testosterone (male hormone) or oestrogen (female hormone) rises to balance it. This supplementation of artificial testosterone alerts the tests to stop producing the hormone – hence they shrink – and eventually the subject’s body now has to rely on the artificial supply. Once this supply is discontinued the subject now has raised oestrogen levels and low testosterone. The result? A male begins to grow female breasts until his natural testosterone levels return to normal.

This is a perfect example that wrestling fans can understand of how we are meant to work in perfect balance. If I asked you to name the most amazingly talented singer, song writer, dancer and performer of the last 20 years you would arguably have to answer Michael Jackson. If I then asked you to name the most messed up, confusing and off the wall celebrity of the last 20 years you would also have to say Michael Jackson. If the average person’s natural good qualities and talents went from one to ten they would have to be balanced out by having equally bad qualities going from one to ten in the opposite direction. Someone like Jackson who clearly had natural talents from one to twenty sadly found that nature balanced them out just as far the other way. This is another form of nature’s balance.

Of course, we in the one to ten group cannot understand his actions because we are clearly not in the same league as him on a negative level just like we never were on a positive end of it either, which is why we all thought he was out of this world. Nature picks our talents for us. They are our pride and joy or our burden and misery depending how we choose to use or abuse them. If you are a maths genius your whole life then you were born with it. Feel thankful but do not congratulate yourself too much, for it was nature that picked that gift for you. If, however, you were always hopeless at maths but through sheer work and determination you become competent and even good at maths then well done. You see even though we are initially at the mercy of nature just like a leaf in the wind, that all changes the moment we become aware of one vital piece of information. We do not have to be the person we are if we do not wish to be.

Working as a life coach has taught me one very important lesson about myself. My gift was that I never thought that anything was unachievable. I have constantly set about doing things in my 28-year existence that were new and previously undone not because I am the world’s hardest worker but simply because I never really saw anything as unachievable. I have always had fears of the worst-case scenario happening but that is a necessary tool when you are trying to push yourself to succeed. The reason I mention this is because many of my clients often seem amazed at how simple it is to change something about themselves or their lives, yet it has always seemed very easy to me. This is not to show off but simply to be thankful that I understand what one of my natural strengths is. I guess it makes up for me being rubbish at maths.

Change is simply a mental choice just like brushing your teeth or blowing you nose. We are in total control of it once we decide that we want it. Yet this is not the problem. The problem is getting people to accept that there may be areas in their life that are not healthy for them physically or mentally. Getting stuck in a rut is a mental state not a physical one but what if the rut you are stuck in is actually that your whole personality is wrong? Worse still what if it isn’t really you?   

So what the hell does this have to do with helping someone be a better wrestler? The answer is everything. In wrestling gyms around the country we have a collection of students who could, if they were shown how, turn this country into a thriving wrestling hotbed. On my recent seminar tour around the UK I went to fourteen wrestling schools and still had another twelve, at least, that I could not attend. Each school had around 25 to 60 full time students and every single one of them had someway that they could potentially contribute to the UK scene from the biggest muscle man to one guy I met in a wheel chair.

Pro wrestling is not like other Olympic sports. I cannot change the rules of the 100 metre sprint to suit my own abilities. I either have what is required or I don’t. All the training in the world is not going to make a difference against people who are genetically faster runners than you. Wrestling is not the same. It is a business that can be twisted around your own skills so that Mick Foley can make more money than Brock Lesnar despite the massive differences in their athletic abilities. With this being the case I think it is fair to say that anyone on this earth can make a living from professional wrestling, they just have to use the one muscle that you very rarely see being put under any real pressure at a wrestling school, the human brain.

So what prevents most aspiring wrestlers from achieving this most holy of grails and making a living from what they love? The answer is very simple: insecurity. You see the world is full of many, very insecure people. It is not our fault as it is that way by design. If you want to keep your partner in a dead end, abusive relationship then the way to achieve it is simply to drum into them that they are ugly and useless and they will begin to cling to the abuser for fear of not being wanted by anyone else. For us to cling to a system that works us like mules we have to be made to feel useless and insecure so that many of us are too scared to try and better ourselves and thus stop being part of the system.

We are the children of the MTV generation. However it is no coincidence that when you say it slowly the word empty is clearly audible in MTV. This means that most of us are made to feel insecure in all walks of life but why then does wrestling seem to attract some of the most insecure people of all? My belief is that it is because we are the artistic and creative thinking types who can see things that exist beyond just plain black and white. If you can truly appreciate wrestling then you are clearly evolved in your level of understanding. You can see the art form that it truly is and that makes you different from so many others who just don’t get it.

The average wrestling fan is more thoughtful and less controlled in their way of thinking and thus I believe can be overly susceptible to those insecurities more than others because they just don’t fit in with the crowd. A crowd who prefer easier-to-comprehend forms of entertainment like football and movies. So those who embark on the treacherous path of trying to squeeze a living from pro wrestling are normally doing so with a veritable lorry load of personal insecurities. This is a vital piece of the puzzle to understand in order for us to ascertain why many of those people fall short of their goals and why many of the ones that do, end up in very bad situations in later life.

First of all, insecurity can be a massive strength. It is the thing that drives most of us to leave a mark in this world and thus is in many ways responsible for most of the things we see around us today even being invented. However, as we have now established balance is the key to everything, just as useful as that trait can be, it is also potentially fatal. If we do not understand our own insecurities then we are slaves to them and let them carry us off in various directions without us ever really understanding why.

Enter the pro wrestling business. If you are not completely happy with who you are then the easiest way to do something about it is not to deal with the original issue and instead simply reinvent yourself and cover over the bits that you are unhappy with. The grappling industry is the ultimate way to do this. Unlike being an actor, pro wrestlers have the same alter ego for most of their careers. In fact, even the person being the alter ego becomes an alter ego and over a period of time the real human they used to be has now been replaced by what appears, superficially at least, to be a far superior model of their former selves. This model gets attention, has confidence and can perform amazing feats of agility and strength. There is a saying in wrestling that goes; “the only thing that isn’t fake is the wrestling”.

After 14 years in this line of work, to be honest I’d have to agree. Wrestling is a fantasy world, with fantasy characters both inside the ring and out. It is a place where many people go to shed past feelings of helplessness and rebuild themselves by creating a pumped up alter ego. This alteration in the journey of their true self leads to the building of their ego self and this is where the problem begins. This alter (action) creates their wrestling ego.

Finally, we have now arrived at the point of this whole article. The ego is the main limiting factor on most wrestlers making it to a level of great wealth or even financial stability. Ego prevents us from seeing things clearly and limits us to stay within the confines of our self controlled bubbles. As I covered earlier we all have areas that we are naturally better at than others. Because of this, once we discover this one thing or area that we are good at we cling to it for fear of exposing ourselves as not being as good as we, or other people, thought we were. We find one thing we are better at than other areas and then blindly defend that one area like it is the be all and end all of the business without wanting to attempt to improve on the other vital parts our over all package needs to reach our full potential.

If you have felt lost and insecure in the past, to stumble upon a world such as wrestling and to now feel in control and empowered is a great feeling. This new world and feeling becomes your new comfort zone or bubble if you will. The thought of leaving this bubble brings back memories of not being as good as we want to be and thus limits us from taking the much needed steps to improve by exploring areas that we are not naturally so good at. This ego stops us from learning past what comes easily to us and is the reason that many potentially great wrestling talents end up not only going nowhere but being frustrated and bitter at people who pose talents in the areas that they do not.

You often see great technical wrestlers knocking great brawlers and big guys taking pot shots at little guys without realising that they are both equally important parts of the puzzle. The brawlers make the high flyers different whilst the little guys make the big guys look bigger. Ego traps many of them in their own bubbles and prevents them from understanding how to maximise their own potential.

Eddy Guerrero was already an amazing high flyer and technician before he entered WWE but if he had just stayed in his comfort zone he would never have gone down in history as one of the all time greats. He was one of the nicest guys that I’d ever met from the top levels of the business and this was certainly one of the reasons he got so good in the ring. He may have had ‘demons’ as WWE so simplistically puts it but I really don’t think he had an ego, which is why he was able to try new things. He didn’t just stick to his comfort zone, he realised that there were areas that he needed to improve on massively and he went out and did it. He threw his ego overboard and dropped his fear of looking silly compared to others who naturally had the skills that he had to work so hard for like promos and character. This lead to him becoming a true legend that was varied and versatile, while many other people considered legends in this business to stick to exactly what they know and nothing else, in order to keep within their bubble.

This is not to say that those who do achieve great heights have lost their ego. Certainly not. In fact many of them have the worst of all but because they are naturally talented they rise to the top, regardless. However they are not free of the ego and when it finally catches up with them (such as it clearly has recently with Ric Flair) the results can be disastrous. What it means is that if you develop an ego to early, at the times where you should be like a sponge you will clearly limit your own chances of success.

Ego is a side effect of an insecure person. The bigger the insecurity, the bigger the ego; the bigger the ego, the harder that person finds it to accept that he might not instantly be good at something so they avoids it at all costs. The more they avoid it the more they limit their capability in that area and the more they limit their capability in that area the more they will try and convince others and themselves that it is not important that they know it for fear looking less proficient then they would like the world to think they are. The fact is that if you let your ego become your main driving force then sure you will get somewhere but will that somewhere be reached without you ever realising your full, true potential?

Just like someone where sunglasses in doors, sure you can see but not as clearly and easily as you would if you took them off. This is likely why the easiest trick in the How To Be a Heel book is to wear sunglasses on the way to the ring because it looks like pure ego and arrogance.

In wrestling circles we refer to a group of wrestlers as the ‘boys’. Well, guess what? That is exactly how many of them act. Like little children being guided by their egos and not their true selves, many of them end up in a complete physical, mental and financial mess at a young age because they never once stopped to think why they are actually doing what they are doing.

For many already deep within the business it may be too late. They will argue against my case sadly because they are afraid to admit the truth of the matter, which is that most of them are using the industry to make up for a multitude of untreated issues from their pasts. The new blood getting into this business on the other hand has a chance. Where Steven Austin attracted teenagers, John Cena is attracting the younger audience. There are many more young wrestlers breaking into the scene than I have seen in a long time. These are the people to change the industry and make it a place where morals and understanding replace ego and disregard.

The wrestling business is not doomed, only the people who are so embedded within the fibre of its current carnation that they cannot see the errors being made by their egos. If done right, wrestling is one of the best forms of therapy I can think of. It is character building, anger releasing, psychologically rewarding, trust developing and economically fruitful. When done badly it is the worst type of drug. It can be highly addictive, financially crippling, emotionally draining, physically destructive and potentially fatal. The difference between the user and the abuser is simply a void. If you have a void in your life that needs filing or escaping from, you turn to hard drugs. The bigger the void the bigger the risk you will take to fill it. If you do not treat this void then you will spend your life trying to fight it with whatever fix comes next.

Wrestling and fame are one way to do this for those who don’t turn to drugs. You cannot fight it forever and unless you deal with it one day it will beat you. The ego is merely like putting a bandage over the void in order to mask it to the world. When people ask me to give my views to the national media about the death rate in wrestling them normally want me to talk about steroids or the cocktails of drugs that some of our dead brothers were taking without once giving a thought to what led to them embarking on that life style from a mental stand point. The media wants to hear drug horror stories to feed the “drugs are bad” bandwagon. However, our trusted doctor’s everyday prescribe the exact same drugs that are killing these guys and girls.

The media fails to focus on that fact because if they did then they would have to delve deeper than simply blaming a tiny little pill. To pay attention to the personal insecurities that brought about these destructive patterns of behaviour in the first place might just get the masses thinking that they are not alone in their own self doubts and untreated issues. God forbid they might even start getting better and wanting more from their lives then dead end jobs and 300 TV channels of brain washing junk pumped into them every night. The fact is that the people dying in these cases like Chris Benoit had obvious voids that they were killing themselves to fill. The fact that they were hiding behind a public mask of confidence and success was only distancing them from their true selves and preventing their past issues (or demons if you work for WWE) from being dealt with.

Top wrestling promoters know that their performers are void ridden and use this to their own advantage. They know that they can offer them terrible working conditions, no pensions, no insurance and make them pay for their own hotels and travel and they workers will take it. Wrestlers call the fans marks but those who get milked like cows just so they can be part of the show are the real marks. Who will be in the wheel chair at 50? For every Rock there are hundreds who die crippled and penniless.

These voids are a promoter’s best friend. Without them they would have to look after the wrestlers in the way that other massive companies do for their staff. Why do you think no one stands up and forms at union at the top level? Because they don’t want to rock the boat and lose their chance of being a star even if it means that their friends will die poor and alone, a fate that may ultimately befall them too. They would rather feel like a Somebody for a day on Pay-Per-View then risk burning a bridge and be left feeling like an empty nobody. The fact that the upper card guys with some power haven’t tried to do something to save the lives of the younger generation shows how morally corrupt many of the ‘superstars’ of this industry really are.

If you are getting started in the business then heed these words and do not get lost. The business is going through a very rough patch publicly and it is simply because nobody has wanted to say what I am saying now for fear of ridicule or making enemies. As you may have gathered by now I don’t give a toss about that. I would rather stand alone and know I spoke up than be adored by the masses whilst living a lie. I know that because I have done this all myself. I am speaking from personal experience. I have had to deal with this myself and seen countless numbers of my professional wrestling friends and colleges suffer the same fate, several of them very big names. This is the truth that will change the business and make it better for the generations to come, not simply a new drug testing policy and pushing someone who is straight edge.

The wrestling business in its purest form is simply amazing. It is untapped as a respected art form and has been raped and dismembered as a nothing but a mindless, overly violent entertainment in the eyes of the general public. Vince McMahon has made wrestling big, yes, but also a big circus and not something that gets the true credit it deserves. Hitler made the swastika (of Hindu origin and formerly a Celtic good luck symbol) big and recognisable but I don’t think you’d really want to wear it on your jacket these days would you? Ultimately, the ego must crumble and the light has to shine through no matter how powerful something may appear at the time.

From our German figure mentioned a second ago to the Roman Empire, ego and lies cannot stay covered for eternity. We have all seen the fall of so many of our former heroes from drug overdoses to heart attacks at forty all the way up to double murder-suicides. Surely the day has come for someone to stand up and look at the mental causes for all this instead of pointing the blame at a collection of medications that the world’s new gods, the corporations, consider the financial holy grail whilst their own privately owned news channels demonise them at the same time.

If we are to change the business we have to start with the brain outwards and not the other way around. You cannot have wrestling without ego. You cannot have ego with insecurity and you cannot have insecurity without untreated issues. This is the maker and breaker of the majority of pro wrestlers so put down that indy DVD you just bought so that you can learn 100 new ways to drop someone on their head and take the time to think about what you need to deal with in order to make your ego work for you and not the other way around.

Do not fear looking silly and avoid learning things that will make you better for fear that your ego will take a hammering. You’ll be laughing all the way to the bank when you are making a living from the thing you love simply because you dared to step outside of your comfort zone. Don’t let issues that are not so hard to deal with prevent you from future success and happiness, because it appears easier to mask them to everyone but yourself. It will certainly make you a better wrestler and it might just save your life.